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10TTTT (Hou)
The Ten Tenets to Technological Trends, or 10TTTT, are the general trends of technological enquiry. Eternity's End Eternity has ended. Now, humanity embarks on its own journey, cut off from the rest of nature by its unique abilities of creation. Wit Beyond Measure As someone once said, "Wit beyond measure / Is humanity's greatest treasure". Fundamentally, this means that throughout history, brains have always triumphed over brawns; brainchilds last forever and pave the way to the future, while the brightly lit empires of force are too easily extinguished. As Churchill once said, "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." The Realm of the Infinite Our capacity for endless ingenuity and creation results in an endless quest; we can never discover all that there is, for there is always something better, toward which humanity will strive for. The Changing Face of Prophesy :See main article: Prophesy's Principal Practical Principles. Growth as a Transcendent Function :See main article: Rate of Change. Our growth as a civilization is increasing faster and faster, and the rate of increase of that is also increasing faster and faster, and so is the rate of that. Therefore, growth follows a transcendental function. The Limit Toward Infinity We cannot achieve our goal of infinite knowledge, because at any period of time we can only gather a finite amount of knowledge. There are some who believe that knowledge is finite, but as the universe itself is getting bigger, and as the realms of the big and small are increasingly hard to explore, we are actually headed toward the standard calculus approach: "the limit as time goes from present to infinity of the amount of knowledge". In other words, we can strive all we want for infinite knowledge, but we shall never reach it, only the amount of knowledge will rise faster and faster until it seems as if we had reached singularity, but in reality the singularity always remains "in the future". Thus, there will be no post-singularity epoch. Instead, our goals will become harder and harder to reach, requiring magnitudes more effort for every increment upward. This phenomenon is also known as the law of dimishing returns. The Summation Toward Infinity All the technologies ever invented by mankind come together all the time to create the next microstate of the future. In essence, as civilization develops, as its growth rate increases faster and faster, the degree of our ability to garner knowledge and power increases according to the transcendental function (as mentioned earlier). Thus, while each subsequent goal we strive for requires increases in magnitude of effort, our civilization's ability to provide that effort also increases in orders of magnitude. Therefore, these two can be seen to roughly cancel out, yielding continual, undimishing discoveries per increment of time. The Fall is Eternal All this is to say that we cannot reach our ideals. The infinity concept is not idealistic; it entails a future in which we continue along the same paths as we have done for time immemorial, without ever realizing the ultimate goals of utopia which people have dreamed long ago. According to these principles, we can get ever closer and closer to perfection in our knowledge and capability, but will never reach it. Meanwhile, the ideals will always remain beyond our grasp. It seems that we are never going back to Eden. Darwin's Greater Nightmare Darwin's main thesis is that everything living is in conflict with everything else in its attempts to survive, and that the best will survive. This holds true for humanity as well. As if wartime weaponry and peacetime economical competition weren't enough, we are also looking at the war against pests and weeds; the war against diseases; the war against "insubordinate" nature. Yet, just as our civilization's ability to wage these disparate types of war continually increases exponentially, so does the ability of our opponents to resist us, both resistant bacteria and rebelling people. We will forever be locked in competition with everything else, and everthing that people can ever hope to do to avert this will simply prove to be folly, just as everything that people have ever done up to the present have proven to be folly. The Resilience of Eternal Change So what does it all mean? Precisely that, although we cannot achieve our ideals, we cannot stop striving for it; failure to strive for perfection is also our individual death-knell. We must strive for perfection, even as we know it to be futile, just so that we can live out our lives to their fullest potential. This is hence a worldview far more dismal than any other, but also the worldview that the trends of civilization have shown to be the truest. Category:Yunzhong Hou (Futurologist) Category:Prediction